“Computers have long inspired dreams of immortality, if not for us, then at least for our memories, our avatars, and our data,” says Julian Lucas. “They are also extraordinarily fragile machines, providing, with each hard-drive crash and video-game death, new mirrors of our own mortality.”
Julian Lucas is this semester’s Franke Visiting Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center. He will deliver his public lecture, “Digital Death Drives,” this Thursday, April 9, from 4:30 pm to 6:00 pm on the lower level of the Humanities Quadrangle. The lecture is free and open to the public.
A staff writer at The New Yorker and an editor at The Dial, Lucas has also contributed to Harper’s Magazine, Vanity Fair, and The New York Review of Books. His writing explores the intersections of literature, history, and the arts with a focus on how concepts and events in history are represented across media.
During his fellowship, Lucas is at work on a book manuscript, “Death Drive,” which explores the concept of mortality in the digital age. The project examines how death is portrayed in video games, new ways of coping with mortality, and the archival challenges posed by the changing landscape of the internet. Among the phenomena he explores is “grief-tech”: the creation of AI avatars modeled on deceased family members, capable of holding conversations, as an emerging way of navigating grief.
The relationship between death and the digital is a subject Lucas has long been drawn to. In a 2017 article for Cabinet, “Welcome to Armageddon! A philosophy of permadeath in the multiuser dungeon,” he examines the text-based online role-playing game Armageddon MUD, which enforces “permadeath”—the principle that when a character dies, they are gone permanently. In that unforgiving environment, Lucas finds a surprisingly rich space for investigating mortality. “Playing Armageddon MUD, like studying philosophy,” he writes, “is learning how to die.”
His lecture promises to extend that inquiry in new directions, offering a timely reflection on how digital technologies are reshaping our understanding of memory, loss, and what it means to endure. That lecture, on April 9, is one in a series of public events made possible by the Franke Visiting Fellows Program. Funded by the generous support of Richard and Barbara Franke, the program invites one distinguished scholar, poet, or artist to Yale each semester. Fellows pursue independent projects, collaborate with colleagues across the university, and deliver a public lecture.
